Dangerous Women

Her wingman rushed forward, and when she couldn’t find a chair, she knelt by the cot. “Raisa. Oh, Raisa, look at you, wrapped up like a mummy.” She fussed with the blankets, smoothed a lock of hair peeking out from the bandage around Raisa’s head, and then fussed with the blankets some more. Good, sweet Inna.

“Inna, this is my brother, David.”

Her eyes widened in shock, but Raisa didn’t get a chance to explain that, yes, “missing” sometimes really meant missing, because David had stood in a rush and offered his chair to Inna, but she shook her head, which left them both standing on opposite sides of the cot, looking at each other across Raisa. Belatedly, Inna held out her hand. David wiped his on his trouser leg before shaking hers. What a David thing to do.

“Raisa’s told me so much about you,” Inna said.

“And she’s told me about you in her letters.”

Inna blushed. Good. Maybe something good would come out of all this.

She ought to be happy. She’d gotten her wish, after all.

Raisa stood on the platform, waiting for the train that would take her away from Voronezh. Her arm was still in a sling, and she leaned heavily on a cane. She couldn’t lift her own bags.

Raisa had argued with the military about the discharge. They should have known she wouldn’t give in—they didn’t understand what she’d had to go through to get into the cockpit in the first place. That was the trick: she kept writing letters, kept showing up, over and over, and they couldn’t tell her no. In a fit of fancy, she wondered if that was what had brought David home: She’d never stopped writing him letters, so he had to come home.

When they finally offered her a compromise—to teach navigation at a training field near Moscow—she took it. It meant that even with the cane and sling, even if she couldn’t walk right or carry her own gear, she still wore her uniform, with all its medals and ribbons. She still held her chin up.

But in the end, even she had to admit she wouldn’t fly again—at least, not in combat.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Inna had come with her to the station to see her off. David had returned to his regiment, but she’d overheard the two of them exchanging promises to write.

“I’m fine, really.”

Inna’s eyes shone as if she might cry. “You’ve gone so quiet. I’m so used to seeing you run around like an angry chicken.”

Raisa smiled at the image. “You’ll write?”

“Of course. Often. I’ll keep you up to date on all the gossip.”

“Yes, I want to know exactly how many planes Liliia Litviak shoots down.”

“She’ll win the war all by herself.”

No, in a few months Raisa would read in the newspaper that Liliia was declared missing in action, shot down over enemy territory, her plane and body unrecovered. First woman fighter ace in history, and she’d be declared a deserter instead of a hero. But they didn’t know that now.

The train’s whistle keened, still some distance away, but they could hear it approach, clacking along its tracks.

“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Inna asked, with something like pleading in her eyes.

Raisa had been staring off into space, something she’d been doing a lot of lately. Wind played with her dark hair, and she looked out across the field and the ruins of the town to where the airfield lay. She thought she heard airplanes overhead.

She said, “I imagined dying in a terrible crash, or shot down in battle. I’d either walk away from this war or I’d die in some gloriously heroic way. I never imagined being … crippled. That the war would keep going on without me.”

Inna touched her shoulder. “We’re all glad you didn’t die. Especially David.”

“Yes, because he would have had to find a way to tell my parents.”

She sighed. “You’re so morbid.”

The train arrived, and a porter came over to help with her luggage. “Be careful, Inna. Find yourself a good wingman to train.”

“I’ll miss you, my dear.”

They hugged tightly but carefully, and Inna stayed to make sure Raisa limped her way onto the train and to her seat without trouble. She waved at Raisa from the platform until the train rolled out of sight.

Sitting in the train, staring out the window, Raisa caught sight of the planes she’d been looking for: a pair of Yaks streaking overhead, on their way to the airfield. But she couldn’t hear their thrumming engines over the sound of the train. Probably just as well.

Joe R. Lansdale

Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writer’s Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners,Bubba Ho-Tep,The Bottoms,The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season,Mucho Mojo,The Two-Bear Mambo,Bad Chili,Rumble Tumble,Captains Outrageous—as well as Western novels such as Texas Night Riders and Blood Dance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West,The Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West,The Big Blow,Sunset and Sawdust,Act of Love,Freezer Burn,Waltz of Shadows,The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, and Leather Maiden. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands;Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back;The Shadows, Kith and Kin;The Long Ones;Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy;Bestsellers Guaranteed;On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks;Electric Gumbo;Writer of the Purple Rage;A Fist Full of Stories;Steppin’ Out, Summer, ’68;Bumper Crop;The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent;For a Few Stories More;Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories;The King and Other Stories;Deadman’s Road; an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal; and High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologies The Best of the West,Retro Pulp Tales,Son of Retro Pulp Tales,Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense from Today’s Masters (with his wife Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, and the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are two new Hap and Leonard novels, Devil Red and Hyenas; the novels Deranged by Choice and Edge of Dark Water; a new collection, Shadows West (with John L. Lansdale); and, as editor, two new anthologies, Crucified Dreams and The Urban Fantasy Anthology (with Peter S. Beagle). He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.

Here he introduces us to the best bad girl ever, a woman who has the mojo, the black doo-doo, and the silent dog whistle over every man she meets; a woman like a bright red apple with a worm in the center, one who could make a priest go home and cut his throat if he saw her walking down the street. In short, a character that only Lansdale could write.

WRESTLING JESUS (#ulink_abfecdf9-eb8d-5381-910e-ea267a90a2cb)

First they took Marvin’s sack lunch, then his money, and then they kicked his ass. In fact, he felt the ass whipping, had it been put on a scale of one to ten, was probably about a fourteen. However, Marvin factored in that some of the beating had been inconsistent, as one of his attackers had paused to light a cigarette, and afterwards, two of them had appeared tired and out of breath.

Lying there, tasting blood, he liked to think that, taking in the pause for a smoke and the obvious exhaustion of a couple of his assailants, points could be taken away from their overall performance, and their rating would merely have been nine or ten instead of the full fourteen.

This, however, didn’t help his ribs one little bit, and it didn’t take away the spots swimming before his eyes just before he passed out from the pain. When he awoke, he was being slapped awake by one of the bullies, who wanted to know if he had any gold teeth. He said he didn’t, and the thug insisted on seeing, and Marvin opened his mouth, and the mugger took a look.